Two governments are counting the same trade, and they no longer agree by almost $100 billion.
From January to July this year, the US Census Bureau recorded $158.3 billion of merchandise imports from China, including Hong Kong. Over the same seven months, China's customs authorities reported $258.1 billion of exports to the United States.
The difference, $99.8 billion, is equal to 63 per cent of the American figure. That is nearly five times its average from 2021 to 2024, according to an analysis published on Friday by Gregory Auclair, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. If the monthly gap stays at its average so far this year, he writes, it will exceed $170 billion for 2026 as a whole.
Two paths after February 2025
Both countries' figures fell sharply in early 2025, when the United States raised tariffs on Chinese goods. Then they parted. By July 2026, China was reporting monthly exports to the United States about 4 per cent below their 2024 average. The US figures showed imports from China 26 per cent below.
On the Census numbers, imports from China and Hong Kong in the first seven months of this year were about 20 per cent lower than in the same months of 2025. It is tempting to read that decline as evidence that tariffs are pulling the two economies apart. Auclair's conclusion is that the US bilateral data "appear to have become less reliable", and that the reported fall "should not be treated as a clean measure of either economic decoupling or the effectiveness of US tariffs."
The two sets of figures have never matched exactly. Before 2020, the United States generally recorded more imports than China recorded as exports. That reversed in 2020, and from 2021 to 2024 China's figure ran above the American one by an average of about 13 per cent. Federal Reserve researchers estimated that tariff evasion accounted for about $55 billion of an $88 billion shift in the gap between 2018 and 2020. The tariffs imposed in 2025 were higher and covered more goods. The average effective rate on imports from China and Hong Kong was 30 per cent in 2025 and 24 per cent so far in 2026, Auclair notes, against 6 per cent for imports from everywhere else.
How goods go missing
Evasion can take several forms, the analysis says. An importer can declare that a shipment comes from a country with a lower tariff. It can classify goods under a category with a lower rate. Or it can understate the value or quantity of what it is bringing in. Because the exporter and the importer file separate declarations, under-invoicing on the American side opens a gap between the two countries' figures.
Auclair points to two outside findings. A New York Times analysis found that the average value of goods per shipping container from China fell by about 40 per cent between January 2025 and February 2026. And Nikkei Asia has reported allegations that logistics providers used shell companies as importers of record and manipulated invoices to cut the duties owed.
Vietnam's gap runs the other way
A false declaration of origin leaves a mark in two places. The true origin country shows more exports than its partner records as imports. The false one shows the reverse.
Vietnam fits that pattern. The United States recorded $149.6 billion of imports from Vietnam in the first seven months of this year, about 41 per cent more than in the same period of 2025, on Census figures. Vietnam's customs agency reported $105.0 billion of exports to the United States. The $44.6 billion gap is consistent with some Chinese goods being relabelled as Vietnamese, Auclair writes, though aggregate data cannot show how much.
After removing the normal 2021-2024 gap, he calculates, the excess comes to about $110 billion for China and Hong Kong and a negative $62.5 billion for Vietnam. If all of Vietnam's excess were relabelled Chinese goods, it would account for 57 per cent of the US-China excess.
The other explanations
The analysis considers two other causes and finds both less likely to explain the recent growth.
Cheap parcels shipped under the de minimis exemption, which let goods worth $800 or less enter duty free, helped open the gap after 2020, because they were more likely to appear in Chinese figures than in American ones. But the United States ended the exemption for Chinese shipments in May 2025 and suspended it globally in August, and in June 2024 China's commerce ministry had encouraged online sellers to ship in bulk to overseas warehouses. Those changes should have narrowed the gap, not widened it.
Chinese exporters inflating their invoices to claim tax rebates is the second possibility. Fed researchers estimated it accounted for about $12 billion of the earlier shift. This time, China has cut export rebates on selected products since December 2024 and stepped up tax enforcement, inspecting more than 130,000 firms suspected of fraudulent invoicing.
The exact causes remain uncertain, Auclair writes, but tariff evasion "appears the most likely explanation" for the gap's growth. He recommends more systematic matching of transaction-level customs data between the two countries, under a framework that already exists but whose implementation, he writes, appears limited.
The practical point is about measurement. A tariff that is evaded still changes trade, but it shows up as a shift in labels, routes and declared prices as much as a fall in goods. Anyone reading the US figures as the volume of Chinese goods arriving in America is, on this analysis, reading a number that has drifted roughly $100 billion away from the one China keeps.
The Chinese and Vietnamese export figures, the size of the gap relative to its 2021-2024 average, the changes against 2024 averages, the effective tariff rates, the de minimis and export-rebate analysis, the earlier Federal Reserve estimates and the quotations are from Gregory Auclair, "Lost in tabulation: Diverging US-China trade data point to tariff evasion", Peterson Institute for International Economics, Realtime Economics, 2 October 2026, read on piie.com. The New York Times and Nikkei Asia findings are as described in that analysis; this publication has not read them. The US import figures for China, Hong Kong and Vietnam were checked against Census Bureau series published on FRED (IMPCH, IMP5820, IMP5520), not seasonally adjusted. The year-on-year changes in US imports from China and Vietnam are this publication's calculations from those series. Accurate to 9am ET on 3 October 2026.
Topics worldtradechinatariffsimportseconomic data
